The American working class is currently on the losing side of a class war. Despite mass unemployment, attacks on workers’ wages, pensions, and medical plans, organized labor does little or nothing. Public health and safety services are failing and disappearing. Public services from the post office to the public schools are underfunded. Not since the last Great Depression have Americans witnessed such economic devastation. Yet organized labor has failed to mobilize working people to resist these daily attacks. Instead, they rely on the Democratic Party to “fix things.”

While organized labor sleeps, the Occupy Movement, which includes rank and file workers, has demonstrated that working people and youth can and will organize to fight back.

In November 2011, two million public workers in the United Kingdom went out on a general strike, protesting the attacks on public workers. Throughout the world, workers are mobilizing and using their collective strength to resist these ongoing attacks on the working class. In the US, the 12/12/11 shut down of the West Coast docks demonstrated the power of workers in a mass action against capital. This action was attacked, however, by establishment union officials who labeled this militant grass-roots strike “a third party action” in violation of established union contracts. Other union officials attacked the Occupy Movement for not getting approval from the union leadership before acting.

In fact, what the working class in this country needs is more radical actions to move towards a sustained nationwide general strike. We must smash the Taft-Hartley law as well as other anti-labor laws that inhibit the right to strike and the unification of the working class.

Only a unified, world-wide working class can possibly hope to rectify the societal injustices existing today. We must challenge and ultimately defeat the multi-nationals which control the world economies and are destroying the planet.

While billions are cut from social services and education, the US government and the Congress continue to fund trillions for wars abroad and for the militarization of police departments at home.

Only a democratic labor movement culminating in the formation of a democratic workers’ party can institute a workers’ program. Only a class orientated party can organize the fight for working class liberation. The fight against concessions, give-backs and sell-outs by a pro-capitalist trade union movement must be stopped. Working people are suffering and dying because of so-called austerity measures being introduced by the ruling class. Institutional violence is as deadly as any weapon used in war.

We must also oppose the racist campaign against Blacks, Latinos and the Arab community. The continuing terrorist attacks on immigrant workers are used to divide workers and pit them against each other instead of focusing on the capitalist economic system that produced this crisis. We must organize to fight back! We are fighting for our lives and the lives of our children. We are fighting for future generations. For the first time in human history, the very life of the planet is at stake. We must prevail. There is no other option.

Your thoughts and opinions are important. Please join us.

The following trade unionists, workers and organizations call for a national conference to help build this movement and party. We call for this conference to be held in San Francisco on March 31, 2012 through April 1, 2012.